Christoph Irmscher

Provost Professor
George F. Getz Jr. Professor in the Wells Scholars Program
Wells Scholars Program Director

Ph.D. habil., University of Bonn, 1997
Ph.D., University of Bonn, 1991
M.A., University of Bonn, 1988

I teach, and write about, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and Canadian literature and culture. A long-standing interest of mine is ecocriticism, specifically early American nature writing—hence my book on The Poetics of Natural History, my edition of the writings of John James Audubon, and the ecocritical anthology, A Keener Perception, which I co-edited with the art historian Alan Braddock (College of William and Mary). Another abiding passion of mine is nineteenth-century American poetry. In Longfellow Redux, I have tried to understand a period in which poetry was meant to be read by a broad, transnational audience.

My favorite place at IU is the Lilly Library; studying manuscripts and rare books is essential to my research and teaching. In recent years, I have worked extensively with public institutions, the National Park Service, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Maine Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where I guest-curated the 2007 Bicentennial Longfellow exhibit (the companion book for the exhibit is Public Poet, Private Man, published by the University of Massachusetts Press). I was a consultant for, and appear in, two award-winning documentaries on John James Audubon, the "American Masters" film directed by Lawrence Hott, and A Summer of Birds, directed by Christina Melton. In 2006, I co-taught an NEH Institute for Teachers on Hawthorne and Longfellow at Bowdoin College in Maine. I have directed two NEH Institutes on John James Audubon at the Lilly.

I recently published a biography of the nineteenth-century anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, which also seeks to understand the beginnings of graduate instruction in this country. Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book has been widely reviewed and was Editor's Choice of The New York Times Book Review in February 2013. I am now at work on a new biography of writer, poet, and activist Max Eastman, tentatively titled When Love Was Red, the first to make use of all the rich archival resources at the Lilly Library. Future projects will likely include another book with art historian Alan Braddock and a new biography John Jay Chapman, one of America's oddest writers and, if Edmund Wilson is right, also one of the best.

I serve on the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment and on the editorial board ofSoundings. I review natural history books for The Weekly Standard. With Christof Mauch (University of Munich, I co-edit the interdisciplinary book series “Transatlantic Perspectives” (Berghahn Books, NY). I am a member of the Authors' Guild; my personal website can be found at www.christophirmscher.com. At IU, I also direct the Wells Scholars Program.

Articles:

"Linen Shreds and Melons in a Field: Emerson and His Contemporaries." The Cambridge History of American Poetry. Ed. Stephen Burt and Alfred Bendixen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, forthcoming.

“‘So That Nothing May Be Lost’: Thomas McIlwraith’s Birds of Ontario,” in Fiamengo, Janice (ed.), Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007) 144-169.